Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A typical image forming apparatus includes, for example, a well-known electrophotographic method image forming apparatus. The electrophotographic method is constituted of five processes of: evenly charging a photosensitive element that does not have an electric charge (a charging process); irradiating a surface of the photosensitive element having the electric charge with a laser beam based on a copy document to form a latent image of the document on the photosensitive element surface (an exposure process); visualizing and imaging the latent image with a toner (a development process); transferring the toner image formed by visualizing and imaging on a recording medium, such as a paper sheet placed on an intermediate transfer belt (a transfer process); and fixing the transferred toner image on the recording medium (a fixation process).
Since some toner remains on the intermediate transfer belt after the toner image is transferred on the recording medium, the remaining toner needs to be removed before the next image formation process. In view of this, various cleaning apparatuses to remove the remaining toner has been proposed and practically used in the image forming apparatus.
A cleaning apparatus, for example, includes a pre-brush, a fur brush roller (a removal roller), a recovery roller, a cleaning blade, and a toner housing portion. The pre-brush charges the remaining toner on the intermediate transfer belt. The fur brush roller removes the toner charged by the pre-brush to clean a surface of the intermediate transfer belt. The recovery roller recovers the toner attached to the fur brush roller. The cleaning blade abuts on a circumference surface of the recovery roller and scrapes off the toner recovered by the recovery roller. The toner housing portion temporarily houses the toner scraped off by the cleaning blade. In the cleaning apparatus, the toner scraped off by the cleaning blade moves to the toner housing portion, the toner moved to the toner housing portion is transported to one end portion in the toner housing portion by a transport screw, and the transported toner is discharged to an outside of the cleaning apparatus from an opening formed in the one end portion in the toner housing portion.